Presidential Candidates Walking a Tightrope Over the Fight on Terrorism

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Donald J. Trump on Monday in Washington. On Tuesday, within hours of seeing images of the carnage in Belgium, Mr. Trump renewed his calls for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Ten hours before terrorists struck Brussels, Donald J. Trump was on television describing his strategy for confronting the Islamic State: He would pound it with airstrikes, but any ground action must be taken by the United States’ partners in the region. He did not mention, if he knew, that this was a pretty close approximation of President Obama’s approach.

But then Mr. Trump went further, saying that the American contribution to NATO — whose headquarters is in Brussels, smack between the airport and the subway station bombed by the Islamic State on Tuesday — should be scaled back.

It was a surprising signal to Europe at a moment when it is under attack, and a vivid reminder of the risks of running for president in an age of terrorism: What sounds reasonably cautious in the evening can ring weak or strategically incoherent by morning.

Most presidential candidates, with rare exceptions, are tempted to adopt far more hawkish stances on the campaign trail than presidents do in the Oval Office, where they must confront the realities of building coalitions, sorting through conflicting intelligence and pursuing comprehensive counterterrorism programs. But in the current atmosphere, a strike like the one on Tuesday in Brussels rekindles every debate about whether the United States should use diplomacy, isolation or military might.

Indeed, within hours of seeing images of the carnage in Belgium, Mr. Trump renewed his calls for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and for legalized torture to extract information from an Islamic State operative captured last week in Brussels. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas went beyond his promise of “carpet-bombing” to demand that the United States “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”

Even Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who objected to Mr. Cruz’s idea, called on Mr. Obama to abandon his trip to Cuba and Argentina, though it was not clear what more he could do from the White House than from the secure bubble in which he travels.

Hillary Clinton, while positioned at the hawkish end of the Democratic race, sounded mild compared with the Republicans scrambling to say how they would interrogate Muslims or separate them from the rest of the population.

A former secretary of state portraying herself as the steadiest, most experienced candidate to lead the United States and the world, Mrs. Clinton is promising continuity with the Obama administration. So she argued for doing more of what it is already doing: standing “in solidarity with our European allies,” tightening the visa and passenger-list systems, and making sure, along the way, to remember that “torture is not effective.”

Mrs. Clinton was headed next to Silicon Valley, however, and she dropped some of the hard language she has used before in siding with the F.B.I. in the debate about cracking encryption on smartphones, falling back to finding a “reasonable path forward” for gaining access for investigators to encrypted conversations and text messages.

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Senator Ted Cruz held a news conference on Tuesday in Washington to discuss the terrorist attacks in Brussels.CreditZach Gibson/The New York Times

Mrs. Clinton’s aides said she would give a speech Wednesday at Stanford University detailing her plans to defeat the Islamic State.

“We’ve got to defeat them online,” she said on Tuesday in Everett, Wash. “That is where they radicalize, and that’s where they propagandize.”

The responses reflect the different primary electorates the Republican and Democratic candidates face. Republican voters overwhelmingly support Mr. Trump’s idea for a ban on Muslim immigrants, exit polls have showed.

But opinion polls have shown that most Democrats do not, and they remain deeply admiring of Mr. Obama — whom Mrs. Clinton has been loath to show up by responding more swiftly to international events.

Like Mr. Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said his piece on Monday, giving the first detailed foreign policy speech of his campaign.

But it was also notable for its generalities: He said that “the United States has the opportunity, as the most powerful nation on earth, to play an extraordinary role” in attempting “to put together a coalition in the region to destroy ISIS.”

To Obama administration officials, this is not a new idea. They have been trying to accomplish exactly that, often with less success than they would like, for three years.

The instant responses to the attacks in Brussels highlighted the tightrope that all of the candidates find themselves walking when the subject turns to combating terrorism. The bitter lessons of the Iraq war loom over the 2016 election, as they loomed over the previous three, and none of the remaining candidates are calling for a ground force to take on the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq.

Mrs. Clinton often recalls that she argued, in Mr. Obama’s first term, for far greater support for the rebel groups confronting President Bashar al-Assad of Syria — a way of indicating that she is somewhat more hawkish than her former boss, who rejected the advice. (Mrs. Clinton’s view was supported by David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director.)

But there is no way to prove whether, had Mrs. Clinton’s counsel been accepted, it would have affected the rise of the Islamic State in Syria, and Mr. Obama insists it would not have.

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Hillary Clinton in Everett, Wash., on Tuesday. In response to the attacks in Belgium, Mrs. Clinton said that the United States should stand “in solidarity with our European allies.”CreditDavid Ryder for The New York Times

Mr. Sanders has the opposite problem: He provides a compelling analysis of why the United States has had such difficulties dealing with the Islamic State’s rise, but few new ideas.

“The fractured nature of the civil war there has diluted the fight against ISIS,” he said about Syria on Monday, “exemplified by the Russian airstrikes that prioritized hitting anti-Assad fighters rather than ISIS.”

Taking back territory from the terrorist group, Mr. Sanders said, was useless without someone to govern it. But he would not say who that someone should be, only that the “struggle must be led by the Muslim countries themselves on the ground” — a rare area of agreement between Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump.

Some of the harshest messages and vaguest plans have come from Mr. Cruz. His carpet-bombing suggestion was immediately denounced because he appeared to be advocating a war crime; carpet-bombing is, by its nature, indiscriminate. So he now focuses on sealing the United States off from terrorist groups. Thus his call on Tuesday for patrols of Muslim neighborhoods, perhaps the ultimate step in ethnic profiling.

Mr. Trump’s willingness to share his opinions over decades in the public eye has left a paper trail of noticeable shifts in his positions: from speaking approvingly of intervention in Iraq early on, to opposing it, to his seemingly dueling impulses of aggressiveness and isolationism as the Republican front-runner.

After the terrorist attacks last year in Paris and San Bernardino, he set off a storm of outrage by calling for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, and he repeated that call on Tuesday in television interviews after the Brussels bombings.

He often promises to “knock the hell out of ISIS,” and in a debate on March 10, he answered a hypothetical question about whether he would heed the advice of generals, if they recommended deploying 20,000 to 30,000 ground troops to Syria, by saying, “I would listen to the generals, but I’m hearing numbers of 20,000 to 30,000.”

But on Monday, Mr. Trump suggested that he would reject any call to use ground troops, and appeared to suggest that he thought that American engagement could be effective even if it were limited to airstrikes — a view not held at the Pentagon.

“I’d get people from that part of the world to put up the troops, and I’d certainly give them air power and air support and some military support,” Mr. Trump said on CNN. “But I would never, ever put up 20,000 or 30,000.”

Yet such calls for a regional ground force have been rejected by most of Syria’s neighbors, except Iran.

Amy Chozick contributed reporting from Everett, Wash., and Matt Flegenheimer and Thomas Kaplan from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Campaign, Walking a Tightrope Over the Fight Against ISIS . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe